From an Irish perspective, France might be the actual Big One in the Six Nations these days but England always feels like the Big One, regardless of whether it is or not. That’s history for you. Ireland vs England isn’t just about the rugby. It’s got so much more wrapped up in it without going into Non-Rugby Stuff like colonisation, wars of independence and stuff that breaks the immersion of sport with the hard reality of real life.
But all that Non-Rugby Stuff plays a part too. It’s history, sure, for the most part, but it’s still relevant when it comes to the mindset that Ireland approach games like this. Annoyingly, that “resentment” if that’s even the right word, isn’t really reflected by the English rugby community at large. They might dislike Ireland because we are a rival team to be beaten or because we might have unlikeable characters in our team but there isn’t really any historical animus, at least not in my experience.
And that’s really annoying. When England play France, it’s Le Crunch. When England play Ireland, it’s just another Six Nations game, albeit an increasingly tough one since the early 2000s.
It reminds me of that line from the Street Fighter movie that came out in the 90s.
Chun-Li: My father saved his village at the cost of his own life. You had him shot as you ran away. A hero at a thousand paces.
M. Bison: I’m sorry. I don’t remember any of it.
Chun-Li: You don’t remember?!
Bison: For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday.
So that takes us to Eddie Jones this week and his comments that Ireland were the favourites for this game. It was nearly the first thing out of his mouth at the presser! When a coach speaks like this you have to take it as both a factual statement – and it this case considering recent performances, it is – but you also have to work out who he’s talking to. Maybe he’s talking to his own players to try to gee them up. Or maybe he’s talking to the Irish players with the idea that he can unearth some kind of built-in inferiority complex that can eat away at the underdog, “we’ll show them” mentality that Irish teams have used successfully for decades. Praise makes you weak. At least Eddie hopes it does.
We won’t ever be who we want to be until we learn to embrace the idea that a full to the brim Twickenham should have no fear for us. It’s easy to talk that, though, and a lot harder to live and breathe it when the whistle goes. For a team that’s only won twice Twickenham since 2010, that underdog mentality might be hard to shake even if everything about the last few months suggests that it has no place in this Irish team.
Ireland want to be the top dogs and you’ll only do that by winning big on the road. Favourites? We are the favourites. Embrace it.
England Rugby: 15. Freddie Steward, 14. Max Malins, 13. Joe Marchant, 12. Henry Slade, 11. Jack Nowell, 10. Marcus Smith, 9. Harry Randall; 1. Ellis Genge, 2. Jamie George, 3. Kyle Sinckler, 4. Maro Itoje, 5. Charlie Ewels, 6. Courtney Lawes (C), 7. Tom Curry, 8. Sam Simmonds
Replacements: 16. Jamie Blamire, 17. Joe Marler, 18. Will Stuart, 19. Joe Launchbury, 20. Alex Dombrandt, 21. Ben Youngs, 22. George Ford, 23. Elliot Daly
England’s job in stopping Ireland is simple in concept; they have to slow us down at the breakdown by hook or by crook. France showed the rest of the Six Nations – and the rest of the world – how to do it and Ireland will be up against it to produce the kind of quick ball that everyone is talking about now without Porter and Kelleher.
That is not interesting, though.
Well, it is, but we’ve been over it already and the challenge for Ireland will be to generate that ruck speed without two core creators of it while England attempt to throw spanners into the whirring gears of our attacking framework. England have the joint-highest defensive ruck speed allowed in the competition – Ireland are the other side – so how their tournament-best ability to slow ruck ball syncs up with our need to speed it up will be a key battleground but the same is equally true for them.
What is interesting, to me at least, is Eddie Jones’s attempt to build an attacking system that he believes can win a World Cup in 2023. You could make an argument that Jones has been attempting this rebuild of England’s attacking game since last season at least and results have been mixed so far, to say the least. The keyword I’ve seen from Jones and his new attack coach Martin Gleeson in their conversations about this attacking rebuild so far is “unpredictability”. England want to foster that unpredictability – Marcus Smith is key to this – but they essentially want to build a system that cannot easily be schemed against in advance. To do this, Jones is encouraging “formation-less” rugby;
“We don’t play any sort of formation. Most teams around the world play a 1-3-3-1 or a 2-4-2 where the forwards are in certain positions on the field. We play a completely free formation. On a set phase we have the first two phases organised, to get us on the front foot, and then we want the nine, 10 and 12 to be organising the attack and taking the opportunities quickly. There’s much more free decision-making for the players in our attack than there is maybe in a formation attack.”
What they’re really talking about here is a rugby league inspired attack. I wrote about this concept back in June 2019 before the last World Cup with For Every Wall A Hammer. In the last year or so, the move to League style attack has accelerated at pace and England’s attack coach Martin Gleeson – a former Rugby League player and assistant coach at Salford Reds before moving to Wasps in 2019 – is the man charged with bringing those concepts to life.
But what are those concepts?
They’re a little hard to work through at the moment because England, much like Ireland in our first 18 months under Catt, are still finding their feet offensively. This is, at once, a player issue and a system issue as it was for Ireland. The former directly affects the latter, as we know well. If you don’t have the right role types, you can’t play the way you want to and while England have some decent guys filling in, to a certain extent, I think they have key issues at scrumhalf, second playmaker (without Farrell) and their midfield hitting options, as well as some question marks about the breakdown efficiency of their pack but the main issues for me, are scrumhalf and their backline hitting options. England have the best gainline won percentage in the Six Nations 2022 so far but that hasn’t really progressed into the kind of attack Jones is talking about. Why is that?
Well, firstly, a Rugby League style attack runs on compressions and options radiating off those compressions. This process has to start at the ruck point with the scrumhalf, who has to be a live sniping and breaking threat. This starts the compression and spacing that you want to exploit by tying the fringe defence to the ruck and, as a result, tethering the next three defenders to that defender. That begins the process. If you don’t have a player that can exert that inertia around the ruck, the League-style attack doesn’t really work to the same level.
Harry Randall – just like Jamison Gibson-Park – gives England that breaking threat and high tempo that the system runs on, but his pass quality has struggled at times to keep up with the demands of the system. You could make the same criticism of Gibson-Park, actually, but I would rate his pass quality above Randall’s. Randall’s passing range and his the consistency of his pass quality ruck to ruck aren’t what they need to be, and it’s one of the issues holding England back, although not the primary cause.
The next step is the first playmaker and in England’s case, that is Marcus Smith. This is where the majority of the work happens, as it does for Ireland with Jonathan Sexton. The interaction with a second playmaker is key to this – Bundee Aki’s importance to Ireland in this regard is similar to what I think Jones projected for the unlucky Owen Farrell – but as a start the #10 in a League-style system has to be an Option player capable of compressing defenders with their own on-ball actions while also assessing their inside, outside and screened pass options.
You often see this on their post-kick transition sequences where England use Freddie Shepherd to set the kind of third phase shapes they look for off the set-piece but in open play.
You can see there how much of England’s work is based off providing options for Smith as the primary handler. He’s often praised for “taking the ball to the line” but that’s only a part of the story – it’s the radiating options around him that allow him to bring his action into the game. The goose-steps, the pass feints – they only work with multiple options to pass to and Simmonds will be well worth watching as a late-arriving inside pass option for Smith to use on those post-transition phases.
This is the core of the League-style attack. It only works with compressions at #9 and #10 with a tonne of looping, late-arriving runners to overload the opposition defence who can’t ID the threats quickly enough. This is what they mean by “unpredictability”.
In some ways, formations as we have come to know them give the opposition a framework to base their defensive lines on. After all, if you’ve got time to set up a 3-3-X shape, then the opposition has time to defend it.
Where England have fallen down is in the quality of their involvements in the midfield. Henry Slade is a passable simulacrum of Owen Farrell but he doesn’t have the elite playmaking or physical durability to make the position work on his own. Bundee Aki, James Lowe and Hugo Keenan provide enough playmaking between the three of them to allow Ireland to keep our deeper layers “fresh” but England haven’t quite cracked that yet. The League system needs multiple playmakers or it doesn’t work as intended. Jones tried to do that with Daly and looped playmaking involvements for Nowell and Malins but it was a janky fit. Marchant at #13 is a closer fit to what I think would work but, like Slade with Farrell, I think Marchant is a Tuilagi stand-in. That kind of offensive power to go with the big strike running of Steward would make this system sing, even without Farrell, but Jones will be hoping that Marchant can add enough of a direct threat on those deeper plays to give Slade more purpose as a deeper handler, outside of some really good wiper kicks.
This battle of the League style attacking systems will be the most interesting one of the weekend in the Six Nations.
